Anyone But Harper

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Introduction

Canada went to the polls to elect a new federal
government on 2008-10-14. Stephen Harper won a minority
government though the unprecedented use of lies and straw man attacks on their
opposition, using their overwhelming war chest of ad money to pound the lies home. I
consider Harper a traitor to his planet for his relentless efforts to derail any attempts
to deal with global warming.

Lies

Mr. Harper is a compulsive liar. Harry Truman could equally well
have been speaking about Harper when he said:

Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at
the same time and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to
keep his hand in.
~ Harry S. Truman(born:1884-05-08 died:1972-12-26 at age:88)

Harper has told hundreds of lies in his rôle as shill to
spread FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) about global warming for the oil patch.

Harper said during the election that there was no recession in Canada.

Harper said during the election that there was no possibility of a deficit.

Harper claimed the Liberal were proposing a carbon tax would be a crippling burden,
that it was just a tax grab. Yet the Liberal platform said no such thing. They called
for a revenue neutral carbon tax with offsetting income tax rebates.

Harper claimed his environmental platform was the strongest of all parties. This is
nonsense. The Harper conservatives are the most anti-environmental in 40 years.

Harper claimed the NDP (New Democratic Party) platform called for new income taxes. It actually called
for cuts. Harper’s plan called for dropping corporate income tax to 12%, one of the lowest rates of any developed countries. The
NDP simply planned
to block future corporate tax cuts announced by Harper.

Harper claimed ending public funding for elections was a cost saving measure. What
a strange co-incidence it would cripple the opposition who were counting on the money
to pay bills. What a strange co-incidence it decimated the Liberal war chest and
inflated his own. What a strange co-incidence it made it trivially easy for the wealthy
Conservative supporters to have the best government money can buy.

When the three opposition parties united to form coalition, Harper lied repeatedly
saying what they were doing was a coup d’étatstealing power, undemocratic,
unprecedented … He shouted, I
am not responsible to turn over power to a group like that The Prime Minister is
required by law to relinquish power if he loses the confidence of parliament. It is not
clear if Harper is lying about the law, or if he is, like Nixon, making a claim that he
is above it. Most Canadians believed Harper’s hysterical BS about a perfectly
legal activity of parliament. Harper insisted that he had the legal right to rule and
the coalition did not because they did not campaign as a coalition during the election.
That is a lie. Any group that can form a majority in parliament has the right to
govern. Harper insisted he had the right to rule rather than the coalition because his
party got more popular votes than the Liberals. That also is a lie. Any group that can
form a majority in parliament has the right to govern. He got away with it because
Canadians don’t expect their Prime Minister to lie about matters of law. Further,
they didn’t expect the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and
CTV (Canadian Television network) to let such lies slide without comment. Harper’s
poll numbers are at an all-time high because he was able to sell his lies.

Harper tried to get Canada involved in the Iraq war and the Afghan war, but just
prior to the election he had a change of heart and decided the Afghan war should end in
2011. How convenient this move took the issue off the
election table. Since the election, he has done nothing to toward that goal. It looks
as though he has no intention of winding down the war after all. That was yet another
brazen lie.

Election Funding

The Conservatives announced, as an
austerity measure, they were chopping the
$1.94 CAD
per vote election public election funding. They claimed the moral high ground, claiming
any opposition was motivated by greed at the public trough. I think the true motive will
become clear from the following table of how funding would look before and after the
Conservative measure:

Effect of Rescinding Public Election Funding

Effect of Rescinding Public Election
Funding

Before

After

Party

war chest

relative
wealth

war chest

relative
wealth

$15,200,000

44.5%

$5,200,000

73.0%

Conservative

$8,231,141

24.1%

$531,141

7.5%

Liberal

$6,100,000

17.9%

$1,200,000

16.9%

NDP

$2,635,000

7.7%

$35,000

0.5%

Bloc Québécios

$1,955,000

5.7%

$155,000

2.2%

Green

On 2008-11-29, Transport Minister Baird announced they
were backing down on this attempt to muzzle the oppostion parties.

Why I would never vote for Harper

Here are ten of my reasons why I would
never vote for Harper. The most important are near the top.

Harper has been the most anti-environment Prime Minister ever. Not only does he
hand licences to pollute to his contributors, he and his environment ministers spread
FUD and
outright lies about global warming, pollution and the green policies of his
competitors to confuse the voters. He is a planetary traitor. He is willing to sell
his country and planet down the river for a few pieces of silver from the oil
industry. The bastard is trying to kill an entire planet just to allow himself a few
years of pomp and political power. He is beneath contempt. He is like a pickpocket on
the deck of the Titanic. He just does not grasp the gravity of the big picture. He
has successfully sold a suicidal lie to the Canadian public, that they have the
luxury of the option of proscrastinating dealing with global warming until sunnier
economic conditions.

If you don’t think the environment is the top priority, then you have been
listening to lies from the mouths of politicians such as Harper rather than
scientists. Politicians know nothing about global warming that scientists did not
tell them. Get it straight from the horse’s mouth such as the presentation
given by Thomas-Homer Dixon to the Canadian International Council 2008 National
Foreign Policy Conference in Toronto.

Harper is gung ho on the military. He has gone many many times over budget on the
Afghanistan war. The war itself makes so sense. Canada is trying to foist one of the
most corrupt drug and war lords on the planet on the Afghans. Karzai runs a trillion
dollar a year heroin empire, pumping out more heroin than the entire planet can
consume. The Karzai regime is not democracy. Despite how much we Canadian dislike the
Taliban, it is clear the majority of Afghans must prefer them to a rotter like Karzai,
or else they could not possibly be winning a war against the combined might of the
heroin lords, the war lords, the USA, Canada and Britain. Harper is constantly dreaming
up new toys to buy for the military, without thinking clearly on just what duties the
military would have that would require them. After years of trumpeting the value of the
Afghanistan war, he blatantly lied about wanting to shut it down in 3 years, just to get the issue off the table during the election. What a
slime bag!

Harper is an outrageous liar. He is outrageous even for a politician. You simply
can’t trust a thing he says. He betrays even his own supporters. The classic
example of this is his solemn promise not to tax income trusts, then turned around and
did it, smashing people’s retirement nest eggs who had trusted him. Harper broke
the law, that he enacted, to call this election. I am astounded he was not prosecuted.
Like Bush, he scoffs at the rule of law. He abuses his power to lift himself above the
law. This is a whole new level of promise breaking. He ignored the negotiated Atlantic
accord and unilaterally changed it. I am astounded the supreme court did not smack him
down. Contracts are absolutely fundamental. He acts like a dictator and has everyone
cowed to let him get away with it.

Harper bills himself as a financial genius, the only man capable of steering Canada
through troubled financial times. But the truth his he a first class bungler. Non-stop
commercials claiming otherwise can’t change that. The Liberals handed him a
roaring economy, with large surpluses. He has squandered them on the Iraq war (
$20,000,000,000.00 CAD
thrown away down blast holes in Afghanistan) and huge tax breaks to the oil industry
that is making the biggest profits in the history of man. They did not need those
breaks! He allowed the oil companies to gouge Canadians with obscene pump prices that
went up whether crude up went up or down. He cheered the meltdown of the Ontario
manufacturing sector through outsourcing. The Conservatives even advised the world
not to invest in Ontario. With friends like that…

Harper’s party is really just the renamed Reform Party with tiny sprinkling
of Progressive Conservatives. Their core values are based on bigotry. They look down
these noses at anyone who is not a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, Fundamentalist
Protestant. If you belong to a minority, you know Harper will screw you if he gets a
majority. Watch them annul all the gay marriages. Watch for US-style laws that treat
Muslims as presumed terrorists. Watch them renege on land claims settlements.

Stephen Harper is in bed with crooks, including his mentor Brian Mulroney, a man
who took
$300,000.00 CAD
in cash bribes and Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier who accidentally passed on government secrets via his biker chick girl
friend to the Hell’s Angels. The Conservatives are rolling in money to pay for TV
ads. Think about where that money came from and just what favours Harper offered in
return. He is in the pocket of the big oil and big banks. Don’t listen to what he
says, look at what the did and tried to do, over the last couple of years.

The tainted meat scandal is so typical of Harper. Coverup was the #1 priority. The
Conservatives did not take action for a couple weeks. Gerry Ritz fired meat inspectors,
and refused to rehire them when the auditor general demanded it. Ritz even joked about
the deaths. Harper’s Conservatives have hearts of stone. They don’t care
about the sick, the poor, or those kids they are killing for no discernible reason in
Afghanistan. Even after the scandal, the inquiry will have no judge, no public input,
and not guarantee the report will be published. The priority is coverup, not preventing
a recurrence.

Harper loves to play the rôle of western sheriff, tough on crime. But he has
no interest in reducing crime, just punishing wrongdoers. He policies on how to reduce
drug addiction have been well proven not to work, but he does not care so long as he
gets to build more prisons and make more profits for his contributors. The United
States has a greater proportion of the population in prison than any other country. If
that were all it took, the USA would be crime free. They are plagued with even more
crime and violence than we are. Further, Harper is making promises that violate supreme
court rulings. He is just posturing to his naïve followers. Criminologists know
how to spend money most efficiently to reduce crime the way they have in Europe.
Let’s emulate success rather than failure.

Harper’s policies call for ever tighter integration militarily and
economically with the USA though globalisation and treaties like NAFTA. These policies lead to loss of Canadian
sovereignty, especially in our ability to run social safety net programs, like
universal medical care and employment insurance and stricter environmental
standards. Harper’s suck-up-to-Bush policies have resulted in loss of jobs for
ordinary Canadians and fabulous profits for the elite who are happy to contribute to
Conservative coffers. He is, bit by bit, selling off control of Canada to the USA. If
Harper gets his way, Canada will just be a separate country in name only.

The only way homelessness will be solved is with federal funding. You can’t
expect a few cities with mild winter climate to fund the problem for all of Canada. Yet
Harper merely wants to punish the homeless for being homeless. He has absolutely no
interest in helping out. It is part of the Conservative ethic to deliberately torment
the poor and disadvantaged.

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
~ Ezekiel 16:49

The Conservatives are really just the renamed Reform Party, the right wing bigot
party. They don’t believe in equality. They believe white, male, heterosexual
Anglo-Saxon, Protestants are more equal than others. To start, Harper want to make gay
people back into second class citizens. Other minorities, including atheists,
immigrants, women and aboriginals will follow.

Strategic Voting

Harper would not be in power were it not the
majority of Canadians had split their vote between Liberals, NDP,
Greens and Bloc.
The way to defeat them is to vote strategically. Where the Conservatives are a threat,
vote for whichever of Liberal, NDP, Green or Bloc has the best chance of winning. Splitting
the left vote just ensures Harper will win. Then when that candidate wins, write him or
her and tell them what you did to remind them your support is conditional. Where the
Conservatives are not a threat, vote your conscience.

Leaders’ Debate

The Federal leaders’ debates for the
2008 Canadian elections were held:

2008-10-02 8 PM EDT
(5 PM
PDT) for the
English language debate moderated by Steve Paikin. Unfortunately, the English language
debate was on the same evening as the Sarah Palin — Joe Biden dustup in the
USA.

They were held at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa. The five participants:

federal leaders

NDP

Jack Layton

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Liberal

Stéphane Dion

Bloc Québécios

Gilles Duceppe

Conservative

Stephen Harper

Endorsement

NDP

Denise Savoie

Denise Savoie

Jack Layton

Jack Layton

In 2008 I voted to re-elect Denise Savoie in Victoria and leader Jack Layton of
the New Democrats because,
the Liberals have proved unwilling to block the anti-environment, pro-war,
anti-working man, American-subservient policies of the Harper Conservatives. The
Liberals have some brave environmental policies, but they were unwilling over the
last two years to put Harper’s feet to the fire. I want someone to give him
a very rough time. In the 2012 by-election I will
probably vote for David Gallagher of the Green Party. I will vote strategically
for Green or NDP.

Roedy Green

Roedy Green

Stick a Fork In Harper, He’s Done

aligner

Stephen Harper’s view of modern meat inspection

Stephen Harper’s view of modern meat inspection

Stephen Harper checks George Bush’s shirt for lipgloss stains.

Stephen Harper checks George Bush’s shirt for lipgloss stains.

Harper impersonator

Harper impersonator

Stephen Harper and John Manley (Afghanistan war architects)

Stephen Harper and John Manley (Afghanistan war architects)

Stephen Harper passing wind

Stephen Harper passing wind

mentor Brian Mulroney and apostle Stephen Harper

mentor Brian Mulroney and apostle Stephen Harper

Stephen Harper smuggling a squirrel into the House of Commons

Stephen Harper smuggling a squirrel into the House of Commons

Stephen Harper with jars wired shut for desperation election diet

Stephen Harper with jars wired shut for desperation election diet

Stephen Harper trying out Roger Ebert’s hair piece in public for the first time

Stephen Harper trying out Roger Ebert’s hair piece in public for the first time

George Bush and Stephen Harper

George Bush and Stephen Harper

Stephen Harper demonstrates Afghan POW interrogation techniques

Stephen Harper demonstrates Afghan POW interrogation techniques

Stephen Harper courts gay vote with simulated male pregnancy

Stephen Harper courts gay vote with simulated male pregnancy

The new soft fuzzy Stephen Harper and cat. Note that the cat’s severed head is just resting on the body.

The new soft fuzzy Stephen Harper and cat. Note that the cat’s severed head is just resting on the body.

John McCain in fetching sweater by designer Mr. Stephen

John McCain in fetching sweater by designer Mr. Stephen

Stephen Harper pitching male enchancement

Stephen Harper pitching male enchancement

Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney at a meeting of the ROV (Royal Order of Vampires.)

Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney at a meeting of the ROV (Royal Order of Vampires.)

Say good-bye Steve

Say good-bye Steve

Steve’s true nature

Steve’s true nature

Stephen Harper’s dog Barney Diefenbaker, that he plans to have stuffed with truffles after he shuffles off this mortal coil

Stephen Harper’s dog Barney Diefenbaker, that he plans to have stuffed with truffles after he shuffles off this mortal coil

The Harper Team

Believe it or not, if the Conservatives win, a whole
team of people will actually run Canada, not just Stephen Harper. Here they are:

aligner

Peter van Loan

Peter van Loan

John Baird

John Baird

Steven Fletcher

Steven Fletcher

Gary Lunn

Gary Lunn

Larry Miller

Larry Miller

Dean del Mastro

Dean del Mastro

Joe Preston

Joe Preston

Deepack Obhrai

Deepack Obhrai

Andrew Scheer

Andrew Scheer

Fabian Manning

Fabian Manning

Mike Wallace

Mike Wallace

Tony Clement

Tony Clement

Bev Shipley

Bev Shipley

Jacques Gourde

Jacques Gourde

Peter Goldring

Peter Goldring

Steven Blaney

Steven Blaney

Brian Storseth

Brian Storseth

James Moore

James Moore

Peter MacKay

Peter MacKay

Leon Benoit

Leon Benoit

David Tilson

David Tilson

Jim Flaherty

Jim Flaherty

Rahim Jaffer

Rahim Jaffer

Dean Allison

Dean Allison

Diane Ablonczy

Diane Ablonczy

Dona Cadman

Dona Cadman

Lawrence Cannon

Lawrence Cannon

Rob Clarke

Rob Clarke

Wayne Easter

Wayne Easter

Ed Holder

Ed Holder

Brian Jean

Brian Jean

Ed Komarnicki

Ed Komarnicki

Denis Lebel

Denis Lebel

Lawrence MacAulay

Lawrence MacAulay

Ted Menzies

Ted Menzies

Pierre Lemieiux

Pierre Lemieiux

Pierre Poilievre

Pierre Poilievre

Brent Rathgeber

Brent Rathgeber

Joy Smith

Joy Smith

Greg Thompson

Greg Thompson

Books

Book referral for Rogue in Power: Why Stephen Harper is Remaking Canada by Stealth

Elizabeth May is head of the Green Party in Canada. This is about how crooked politics is making it impossible to solve the global warming problem. If our planet is to survive, Harper has to be removed from leadership of the country.

Online bookstores carrying Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy